I write, occasionally

Today was Chad Kraus' last day at Pioneer... weird. So here's a little story of him and his time here...

He started the same day I did almost a year ago. The punk actually got the job I applied for, hehe whatever, I write web apps (roxor). Anyway, chad was fun because he always fell asleep in meetings. He also made lots of funny faces and was a big alcoholic.... haha, j/k.

For a few months we put random food (pickles, pepper bar, donuts, etc) in one of his drawers. It took him a few month's to find it and when he did, it was gross and he was mad. Kraus' family also has a big involvement with Dairy Queen; a lot of times kraus would go home to eat hamburgers for lunch. So Nehru started calling them Krausburgers... which caught …

KeviAtWork: i have to confess something to you that will piss you off for the rest of the day
KeviAtWork: i got a cat last night
Derek R Brooks: i dont even know what to say to that
KeviAtWork: :-(
Derek R Brooks: i am disappointed
Derek R Brooks: and sad
Derek R Brooks: :-(
KeviAtWork: dude
KeviAtWork: this cat rules
Derek R Brooks: that is the worst oxymoron i've ever heard
Derek R Brooks: you are a pussy
KeviAtWork: haha
KeviAtWork: man, i need the internet at my house so i can post I Against I
Derek R Brooks: you need a 22 at your house so you can shoot your cat
KeviAtWork: no

Eh, so I guess I should write something on my site. The weekend was decent... Friday night was another 9 player no-limit hold 'em tournament at Nehru's. I took 2nd place in the first game, got out early in the second, and took 4th place in the third. Nehru's garage makes me jealous... 3 car garage, refrigerator, 2004 M3, 2002 Prowler, etc.

Saturday I had to drive to Mount Vernon for Casey and Jay's wedding. Catholic weddings are weird. The reception was better than the last wedding... even though the DJ was a dorkface. Luckily Cassie saved us and took us home.

Nick and I have a big a site to get done this week... lots of work to do. My car will be very happy with my extra cash though, hehe. I can't wait to see my buddies on …

I got a new intake pipe from ebay yesterday. dsmtuners.com tells you that it's the first step you should take (along with a conical air filter) when modding your car. However, I'm finding out that most intake pipes don't really do anything for a turbo 2g DSM. The Injen intake (which is very similar to the intake I got) is dyno proven to not increase horsepower. The only thing that it does is look cool and make the turbo/BOV sound cooler.

There were also a lot of things wrong with this product from importblowoutsales. First I noticed that the inside is very very rough, but I guess this makes no difference. Even the Injen intakes look this way. Then I noticed that this might not seal very well. Also, only 1 of the hose clamps …

This year Theta Formal was in Dubuque on the Miss Dubuque dinner boat, which was nice... definitely something different than normal. It was funny because a few of the girls had just gotten back from a Carribean Cruise, so they thought that our small dinner boat was HILARIOUS.... it's a friggin dinner boat on the Mississippi and it costs $35 a person, what do you expect? It's sorta like how my car is really really funny to ride in after riding on a bus.... err... wait.

Anyway, while on the boat, I spilled a drink on myself and Kari spilled marinara sauce on her dress, we rule. After that we all went back to our hotel where we swam and hung out. It was fun and some of the thetas are 'slightly above average,' so that makes the 'not …

Wow, what a weird day. It looks like Kraus (aka krausburger aka santa kraus) is leaving Pioneer to join the family business. The punk already bought a house down there on the water with a jetski lift... wtf? That'll be friggin awesome.

In other sweet news, Soap is flying me to Saint Louis in a couple weeks to do a couple demos and hang out with Aaron and Jordan... hopefully Zach can come to.

Also, Nick and I just got 2 new web jobs for Truespin.

BIG THINGS goin on, BIG THINGS.

So, I'm starting to get a lot of friends with web sites, which kinda sucks because I've maxed out the space that I left for my friends' names above the friends link on the header. I added Dave Conger and Nehru Cheddie to the list, so check out their sites. Nehru is a guy I work with and fellow car enthusiast and Dave is a dude I know from my Soaping web sites and through short films, etc.

Also, if you actually click the friends link, you can see some news from my buddies' sites... that is, IF they have an RSS feed. (if you're on that list and you don't have a feed, you should get one. If you're using PHP/MySQL, I can hook you up with a script to generate one).

If I get anymore friends, I'll just start removing the less cool …

This weekend I went to Mount Vernon for Kari's friend's (Morgan) wedding. Kari made me go to the rehearsal which was sooooo lame. I left halfway through and went to the mall. Then on saturday we went to the wedding. Let me just say that I am definitely not ready to get married. Seriously, I can't believe how the people act at them. I just do not act the way that you're supposed to at a wedding. I don't let ladies go first, I don't grab a lady's hand when she's about to sit down or go up a step or something. I don't hold hands, and I especially don't look a girl in the eyes for 10 straight minutes while holding hands. If I ever get married, I'm gonna have like 50 groomsmen so that I can just hang out with them up front and not …

As most of you know (due to my mood and constant whining) I lost my 120gig Hard Drive 2 weeks ago (pictures, videos, professional work, etc). We tried everything that we could think of to get the data back. Minnis helped me a lot through the whole process. I'd pretty much lost all hope, nothing we tried would recover my files. Well yesterday we started this program called Clone Maxx to try to copy all data from one HD to another HD. It ran extremely slow, over night for 11 hours and 35 minutes.

Well, when I got to work this morning I went straight to the PC, and the monitor said, "PC Inspector Clone Maxx Complete." (This is about the time that my pants almost got soiled). So I mounted a hard drive with win2k on it, put my new …

This weekend Nathan and I went to Minneapolis for a couple Heely demos. For the most part it was pretty fun, but it was also sort of annoying. The roads around the Twin Cities suck... bad. Seriously, 35w does not mean 35 west, wtf. And it sucks even more that the people living there can't give you good directions to anything.

Friday night we decided to go to Mystic Lake (one of the biggest casinos in the midwest). The guy at the front desk of our hotel gave us directions that got us completely lost. It took us over an hour to get somewhere that was 15 minutes away... It made us both annoyed, frustrated, and pissed off. Once we got there we stayed for about 30 minutes... I've never really gone to a casino other than to eat... …

So I had this hard drive crash... here are the earlier details.

First of all, Minnis rules. He's been trying a bunch of things with my HD today that I haven't thought of. After being unsuccessful with Knoppix and the linux box, we dropped it into a win2k machine and ran powermax, which is some diagnostic software that maxtor put out. Anyway, they gave me a diagnostic code (de67a279) and told me to visit their site. So I visit it, check out the warranty services, enter my serial number and find that my drive is under warranty until 8/11/04, w00000000t.

So they are sending me a free 120 gig HD. We also ran a chkdsk and saw a pretty good list of files on the drive... So at least something is getting read from the disk. I still …

Apple put out this insanely awesome mp3 player called an "iPod." I bought this brilliant device last June. It is so handy because you can put hours and hours of music on it and take it anywhere. I took it skating, I took it to work, I plugged it into my stereo at home, etc.

It also rules when you start to come to the conclusion that this dope device is the reason for a sh*tload of data loss. For example, that HD of mine that crashed last week... I'm pretty sure that's due to my ipod. Also, when I backed all that stuff up on my ipod... I can't get it back off. It either locks up my computer, locks up the ipod, or a combination of both. The only way out of this is to hold down the power button on my PC. SWEET! so maybe it's my …

About a month ago ABC's Good Morning America advertised a "Cool Cubicle Challenge" that encouraged people to send in short videos of their cubicles. Basically you were supposed to show them why your cubicle is fun/cool. Obviously, Kevin and I jumped on the idea. We have pretty cool cubes, it was a chance to get on national TV, and we like to make videos.

First I went to Cedar Rapids and helped Kevi film his video, which turned out dope after the editing. Then my cousin Anthony and I filmed my video, which also turned out decent.

We sent them in, hoping that we would both get on GMA, even if we didn't win... we just wanted a second or 2 on national TV. So, about a week after submitting them, we found this on GMA's website, haha. …

Lately I've been really heavy into organizing and backing up all my pictures and video. I recently bought a fireproof safe to keep miniDV tapes and picture CDs in. I also have copies of most picture CDs at work. Last week I even went and had all of my old advantix film rolls converted to CDs (22 rolls - $120). Then, over the course of an evening I organized them all into folders in chronological order on my PC (just like all my other pics are organized). The next step was to buy a scanner this week and scan the rest of my pictures. Then I'd make a couple backups of everything and store them in different locations.

You always hear of people "losing all their memories in a fire" ... I don't want this to happen. So everything is …

This weekend was pretty laid back, booo. Friday night, Jason, Jodi, Nathan, Andy and I went to the Funny Bone. The comedian was pretty good... he offended a lot of people, which is awesome... "racism is gay" haha.

Saturday, kari came over for the Cornell 150th Anniversary Gala at the Des Moines Country Club. It wasn't a rockin party or anything but they didn't ask alumni for money once! ...I was surprised by that. Lots of good food, drinks, and a nice video. There were less than 10 people there that went to school with me (everyone else was old), but it was still decent.

My clie broke while trying to get a wi-fi signal there, which is sad. I can't figure out this error at all: DataMgr.c, Line:9524, Index out of range. I only …

Nordstrom department stores started selling heely's which is a big deal because that's a huge account for us to get. So HSL asked if I would be willing to go to Chicago to do a couple Demos at the stores up there. I was orginally supposed to meet Zach and Aaron there to do demos, but they couldn't make it. So instead, Kari went with me, and I did the demos by myself.

Anyway, Chicago was really fun again. Friday night, Kari and I ate at Rock Bottom. It was fun to see the differences between the restaurants in Des Moines and Chicago. The menus were pretty much the same, the beers were pretty much the same but had different names, however everything was priced differently. For Kari and I to each have 1 mug it was $11, where here it …

10:09|<xy_goat> all you gotta do is start linking to some blogs
10:09|<xy_goat> like in a post be like "harper sucks" and link to me

I'm going to see this suck-face this weekend. plus i'm doing demos for heely's. it'll be fun.

Kill Hannah and HIM are touring together, which rules so much. I want to go to one the shows soooo bad. Kari and I can get plane tickets pretty easily, so we were even considering flying to NY, LA, or even Philadelphia to see them together.

But every stop on the tour is on a bad date. I'm either doing demos, working, or going to weddings. The closest that they're going to be is Chicago... which is still a 5 hour drive. It's on a Sunday night... the same Sunday that I have a Soap shoe demo in Iowa City. I also have only 1 more vacation day.

Stupid stupid Iowa. Why can't Des Moines be bigger.... or even Omaha, or Minneapolis.

I wrote a new picture system for the site. It's pretty dope. All I really have to do now is put pictures into the folders and it automatically parses through them and prints them all out. It doesn't use a database or anything. If you hover over the thumbnails they change to color too, w00t.

I also added a few pictures while I was working on it.

Kevin got some tickets to go to the Tesla show in Des Moines tonight. However, the person he was going with sold out, so I decided that I'd go to the concert with him. ...Holy 80s.

Everyone there was seriously stuck in the 80s (MAYBE early 90s). Kevin and I were within the youngest 3% there. The only people younger than us were there with their parents, haha.

Here are a few things to note about the night: big hair, mullets, nascar hats, fist pumping, bangs, receding hairlines, air guitar, dude with stomach hanging out of shirt, shoulderless pink shirts with fishnet tights, etc.

however, one guy seriously "LOVES my show." he told me, haha. I'M NOT BAM!

one more thing to note, Amy Smart has now taken the lead as my biggest …